Nikola is a static site and blog generator written in
Python that I’ve been using for a good while now.
This blog post describes how to install
Nikola on Debian. Now, this may look like a
long winded way to install Nikola, given that Debian .deb package exist, but
in my opinion it is the correct way to install Nikola on Debian.

Create a virtualenv for Nikola

Open a new shell to ensure that the virtualenvwrapper configuration is active.

The following will create a new virtualenv called nikola based on Python 2.7.

mkvirtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 ~/Snakepit/nikola-640

Working on a virtualenv

To workon, or activate, an existing virtualenv do the following.

workon nikola-640

You can switch to another virtualenv at any time, just use workon envname.
Your shell prompt will change while a virtualenv is being worked on to
indicate which virtualenv is currently active.

While working on a virtualenv you can pip install what you need or manually
install any Python libraries safe in the knowledge you will not adversely
damage any other virtualenvs or the global packages in the process. Very
useful for developing a new branch which may have different library
requirements than the master/head.

When you are finished working in a virtualenv you can deactivate it by
simply executing deactivate.

Install Nikola requirements

Nikola is will be powered by Python 2.7 and some additional packages will
be required.